The International Federation of University Women (IFUW) founded in 1919 defined itself as a “league of educated women” (IFUW 1920, 76) who “by reason of a common type of education and training, have also in common certain traditions and ideals and who in a very real sense, therefore, speak a common language”(IFUW 1920, 10). The IFUW used its members’ university education to distinguish itself from other international women’s organisations, including those pursuing change in women’s education. IFUW President, Virginia Gildersleeve, noted in 1925: “We do not wish to merge our own identity too far in other international organisations. We think we have a great advantage, among them all, in our common background of a university training, in the prevalence of an international mind in scholarship, and in our consequent comparative homogeneity" (IFUW 1925, 7).

The first section of the paper explores the IFUW’s use of standardisation processes to regulate its membership as it sought to create and preserve the  “comparative homogeneity” to which Gildersleeve referred. In the context of the uneven development of higher education for women internationally and the resulting potential for the term “university woman” to be differently interpreted in different countries (Cabanel 2018) the IFUW investigated the qualifications held by members of national associations of university women (Hunyadi 2016) in order to advise the IFUW council on the requirements for membership in national associations wishing to affiliate. This section of the paper traces the assumptions governing the IFUW’s standardisation processes around national society affiliation through which the IFUW expected homogeneity to operate.

While the IFUW stressed homogeneity it constituted what Dussel and Ydesen (2017) term a “space of  encounter” where dividing practices and exclusions operated along lines theorised by Popkewitz (2004). The IFUW’s first constitution noted that the term national federation was not to be taken to mean an exclusively national or racial society but was to combine all university women living in the same geographical area into one federation representing the country in which they lived. The second section of the paper focuses on “communities within communities” by looking at how aspects of national identities and imperialism threaded through the IFUW”s “comparative homogeneity” in the context of displaced peoples in Europe in the aftermath of the Versailles settlement. It asks how the IFUW dealt with the aspirations of university women belonging to national minorities in relation to dominant IFUW configurations of the nation-state based on Western territorial notions.

The third section approaches the IFUW through Tsing's (2011) theorisation of “zones of awkward engagement”. The IFUW grew from an alliance between British and American federations of university women and adopted standardisation process that the American Association of University Women (AAUW) used from the late 1880s to determine national membership of local American associations and to advance conditions and status for women students and faculty in higher education. In a context where educational opportunities for African Americans lagged far behind those of white women, and few black women attended collegiate level schools, this affiliation process resulted in AAUW membership being almost exclusively white, despite the organisation not specifically banning African American members (Eisenmann 2010). In looking at how the IFUW”s “comparative homogeneity” was fractured around race the third section considers tensions and compromises within transnational and transatlantic flows at a point when the AAUW continued to discriminate on the basis of race but the IFUW introduced into its constitution what came to be known as the “race clause” as it sought to deal with racism in respect of its national societies in Germany, Austria and Italy with the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe.

The paper deploys Herren’s (2014, 2) spatial view of international organisations as “a self-declared form of interaction across borders that produces footprints and patterns characteristic of the time frame concerned”. Herren’s definition casts international women’s organisations like the IFUW as spaces of encounter (Dussel and Ydesen 2017) and accommodates Featherstone’s (2012) argument that solidarities are forged through struggle and through specific translocal articulations and connections in and between different sites. The analysis also draws on Tsing’s (2011, 6) view of international organisations as “zones of awkward engagement” and on Serres' (1991, 8, 9, 12) configuration of sites as a middle spaces of exposure to the “other”. The paper uses insights from Tsing and Serres to argue that while particular international connections became and remained authoritative within the IFUW, new realities were made through friction and turbulence and got in the way of the smooth operation of power. The paper brings these spatial dimensions together with a process approach to history focussed around questions about how standardisation operated in the IFUW in respect of fractures of ethnicity and race. It does so by tracing what Popkewitz (2004) terms “normalising and dividing practices” through which inclusions and exclusions in the IFUW operated around abjection. To examine fractures around ethnicity and race in the IFUW the paper locates dividing practices as aspects of transnational exchanges and entangled border-crossings; and it embeds normalising and dividing practices within the processes of weaving and assemblage through which the IFUW was constituted along lines that resonate with Ingold's (2011) configuration of a ‘domain of entanglement’.These approaches inform analysis of how dividing practices and discursive categories overlapped and changed over time to texture the community of the IFUW as a “league of educated women” where “comparative homogeneity” took on particular hues. The sources for the paper include archival documents, reports and published material generated by the IFUW and conserved in the Sybil Campbell Collection at the University of Winchester, the Aletta archive in Amsterdam and the League of Nations in Geneva. Attention will be paid to the IFUW’s use of comparative visual inscription devices to illustrate national structures of women’s higher education as part of its standardisation processes.

The paper concludes by pointing to ways in which the standardisation processes through which IFUW sought to regulate the homogeneity of its membership was nonetheless fractured. The IFUW’s Committee of Standards provided a “mechanics of internationalism” (Geyer and Paulmann 2001) that the IFUW used to demonstrate the academic excellence of the “university woman” and to facilitate the transnational circulation of students and faculty in a situation where academic credentials carried considerable authority but where, as numerous studies show, some countries and some higher education institutions debarred women from certification, despite the women having followed university-level study (Spencer 2019). The IFUW’s standardisation process drew boundaries around programmes which the organisation considered to produce “expert” and “professional” women, whose knowledge was considered “authoritative” (Goodman 2019a). It constituted a mechanism through which processes of internationalisation operated via transnational cooperation to build the “comparative homogeneity” of the IFUW; but it also worked as a mechanism through which inclusions and exclusions operated in the IFUW and for pointing women students and graduates to particular universities for (further) study. The assumptions informing the IFUW upheld an imperial order and dampened down the aspirations of national minorities by drawing a dividing line between legitimate and non-legitimate political actors (Goodman 2019b). Furthermore, as interactions between the IFUW and the AAUW over issues of race illustrate, processes of standardisation based on comparison produced an illusion of neutrality and egalitarianism that masked abjections and exclusions within comparison as process and as style of reason (Popkewitz, 2013). They produced tensions with the potential to fracture the “comparative homogeneity” of the IFUW’s transatlantic and transnational relations when responses to American racism and to European fascism collided in the IFUW during the 1930s.

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